Ballard, who has written several books and is known throughout the world as a science fiction writer, is primarily famous for his autobiographical novel “Empire of the Sun,” about several years of his boyhood life in a concentration camp in China during the Japanese occupation during the Second World War. This true and brutal story of survival in conditions of hunger, death and cruelty of people towards each other does not contain moral judgments and is stunning in the spontaneity with which eleven-year-old Jim adapts to war.